Elizabeth Rhein- Eliade and the Sacred-Reading

For the paper I needed to write for this class, I got a book written by Mircea Eliade which discusses the profane and sacred in great detail. At the beginning of his description of the sacred, he starts off by saying it is obviously the opposite of the profane. The sacred can be found in all sorts of things such as a rock or tree to something much more religious. It really depends on the person. These earthly items become something more out of this world when considered sacred. These items are called hierophanies, or an object that symbolizes something much more than its face value. As Eliade says, the item stays itself, but is also something else. I really like the sentence that “the sacred is saturated with being” (Eliade 12). From these writings, it seems that the sacred is what people aim for while profane is what they want to experience less of. If everything was profane then there would be no connection to out of this world objects. Obviously thinking about differences between the sacred and profane have become a great interest to me through out the semester and I continue to try and learn more about it. I guess a possible example of sacred time can be how people have turned two simple pieces of wood into a world renowned Christian symbol known as the cross. The cross represents two things at once, something earthy and something sacred.